14 ms·

Supercharge your Sublime Text 3 to increase your productivity

105 points by arsham 10y ago

andrewmcwatters 10y ago
It's too bad Atom isn't as fast or faster than Sublime Text 3. I just can't go back to Sublime Text now, Atom is good enough.
- gcp 10y ago
  Visual Studio Code?
- BuildTheRobots 10y ago
  What does Atom bring to the party that Sublime Text 3 doesn't? All I can of (off the top of my head) is slower and chews more memory but is open source.
  - andrewmcwatters 10y ago
    Everyone develops packages for it, and they're much more actively supported than ST3 packages. It's really the ecosystem.
    - gcp 10y ago
      I think that's really a side effect of it being free. (And I wonder if VSCode will eat that ecosystem...) Do you have examples where the Atom/VSCode package is much better maintained than the ST3 one?
    - therealmarv 10y ago
      My experience is that the overall Sublime packages are much more stable and do not need so much rework and maintenance. I cannot even count how many times Atom packages failed (maybe it's also just because I cannot see fancy failing error messages of packages in Sublime).
  - SippinLean 10y ago
    The interface for one. OOTB Sublime Text can't install packages, for example. Once you install Package Manager, discovery is terrible; you have to know the name of the package you want beforehand. On Atom/VSCode you can easily browse all packages and install them from the editor itself.
- berry_sortoro 10y ago
  I went from sublime to brackets to atom and sure giving the under-hood is a "bloated" chromium it may be "slower" but seriously does it really matter? I remember to notice the file witching in sublime text was really snappy and I am not sure it always felt like the files where already cached in ram. In Atom I sometime can feel the rendering but thats it. Nowadays I got used to it and I think Atom is not actually really slow. I mean what speed really need form a editor? You need speed in build process ... it the editor takes 20 milliseconds more for something I could not care less. I switched because ST is closed source and I think its (closed source) days are numbered. Given that great open source editors are on the rise. Also given that Atom and Brackets are written in JS/CSS they are so much better when it comes to plugins and integration of stuff if your a web developer I see no reason to go with SL3. Also given that Atom is from Github where pretty much all the code is I think I know without even looking it up that Atom has the most and best maintained ecosystem of plugins.
adrianN 10y ago
That's a pretty neat article. Currently I'm trying to get away from Sublime because it's closed source. I considered Lime Text, the OSS clone, but that project seems to be dead. So I settled for vim. I'm still not as productive as with Sublime, but I'm getting there. Does anybody know a similar article for vim or other editors?
- hguant 10y ago
  This article seems to mostly be about searching, manipulating words and lines, etc. If that's what you're looking for, vimtutor is a pretty good place to start. It should be available from the command line if you've installed vim. There are some pretty good github pages out there to help configure your vimrc into a monster. Ultimate vimrc is a pretty good baseline if you take the time to trime away some cruft.
- antihero 10y ago
  I'm using Visual Studio Code and absolutely loving it. If you document your code (JSDoc) etc, the IntelliSense is absolutely incredible. There's a vibrant plugin community, the only flaws I have found so far: * You can't add multiple folders to a project. This is fucking irritating. * The git plugin doesn't work on subfolders - IE because of problem number one, I put a group of (say, microservices) into a parent folder and add that, which in turn breaks the Git plugin. If you can ignore those things it's bloody brilliant. Obviously after you've added a bunch of extensions and stuff to spruce it up. It feels faster than Atom, too.
  - gcp 10y ago
    My flaws: 1) Uses Chrome's font renderer - it looks terrible on Windows 2) Indent = Tab size 3) Themes can't properly customize some key on-screen assets 4) No macro recording/playback 5) Can't edit enormous files Other than that the add-on ecosystem can be a bit fiddly, and you won't find syntax highlighting for more oddball things that you'd 100% find for vim or Emacs. Oh, and sometimes it ends up using 100% of the CPU in the V8 GC. Might be add-on related.
    - 10y ago
trishume 10y ago
Good article. Sublime Text has a lot of power up its sleave. I think a lot of people ditch Sublime for vim or emacs because they want a more powerful editor without trying to learn the more advanced features of Sublime and customize it to their liking. I was one of these people, I spent 6 months using Vim and 6 months using Emacs, but eventually came back to Sublime because I could customize it with plugins (like Vintageous) that made it even more powerful and productive than Vim or Emacs. Especially because I wasn't constantly wasting time debugging bugs created by interactions between the piles of hacks all the Vim/Emacs plugins used. I spent 6 entire months contributing to Spacemacs fixing bugs and broken things and there was no end to them in sight. I realized that while I switched to Emacs to get more work done on my projects, I ended up ditching all my projects in order to fix broken Emacs things. That's when I switched back to Sublime.
- hawski 10y ago
  I started to wonder if Sublime would suit me. I am for many years now primarely vim user. I use it now mainly, because I've got used to it and it's available everywhere. I was once a no-mouse-only-keyboard user, but now it all seem like busy-work. I would prefer just to point out what I want. I am not affraid of typing as I mainly use command line and like to use ocasional pipeline with some awk scripting to achieve output that I want. I find Unix toolset more approachable than vim. It's just that I feel like every magic incantation of vim commands spends my mental energry. I feel smart after some complex edit with only a couple of keystrokes, but a bit less focused at real issues. Editing is such a small part of programming. I understand that people may not have such problems, but that's me. My dream editor would be something like Acme [0], but a bit more modern. I even started doing my own experimental editor [1] inspired by Acme. I mainly want a mouse driven editor with easy ties to shell. Unfortunately my development pace has been glacial for some time. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acme_(text_editor) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acme_(text_editor) [1] https://github.com/hadrianw/werf https://github.com/hadrianw/werf
  - Philipp__ 10y ago
    I am kinda thinking the same way. What I liked so much about your comment is that I found myself in pretty same position. I used vim for a few years, got used to that zsh+tmux combo, and my environment was mostly wrapped around Vim (not UNIX like I thought it was). Then after I gave Emacs a shot, I used GUI version, and I saw that it is not the end of the world because I didn't use it as in-terminal editor. I am seriously reconsidering ditching everything and go to Sublime. Why? It's fast, sleek and it does the job. With Emacs I start working on something, and few hours later I am like "why the fuck am I writing lisp and tweaking emacs". I get it, people that used it during 90s, and for 10+ years, they are set in the stone, and why would they switch. But now I really reconsider my options. Vim is much better in that aspect, I spent years with it and have it much or less to my liking, but I always come to some edge case where I change editor. For example, I want to practice few exercises from SCIP I need Emacs, because Lisp programming in Emacs is so effortless and good. I want to write some Go I jump to Vim because vim-go just works perfectly for me. When I am doing some admin work on system I run Vim, but when I want to play with Clojure I need to go back to Emacs. You see the trend? How would Sublime cover all those functional languages, is it any good? If I could have extremely light version of Emacs, that worked in terminal, much better and much more flexible than og Emacs, with good support for REPLs. When you break the no-mouse barrier, you see huge boost of productivity, but later after some time it diminishes and returns. I know I do not want Electron based editor. Terminal preferably but not the key. Something swift and clean. Vim does the job 80% of time but functional languages just work better inside Emacs. I am holding my breath for Xi Editor [0]. It's written in rust, has some interesting abstractions and implementations, native is priority, and overall looks like potential checker for all my boxes. But it is nowhere near to the point of replacing vim or emacs for me. I rambled too much... [0] https://github.com/google/xi-editor https://github.com/google/xi-editor
stinos 10y ago
Nice article, ideal to get new users started with ST. Couple of remarks: - fuzzy search example uses ctrl-p, should be ctrl-shitf-p - idem for wrap lines example - Put your cursor on a word, then hit ctrl+d it will select that word. just double-clicking seems faster (though I reckon if you'll be using ctrl-d repeatedly afterwards anyway it might not matter)
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
tedmiston 10y ago
There are a few staple packages mentioned here, but this post largely just repeats the Sublime docs [1][2], which are easier to read IMO. Wes Bos has a book Sublime Text Power User [3] if you're looking to do even more advanced things, especially with workflows. [1]: https://www.sublimetext.com/docs/3/ https://www.sublimetext.com/docs/3/ [2]: http://docs.sublimetext.info/en/latest/index.html http://docs.sublimetext.info/en/latest/index.html [3]: https://sublimetextbook.com/ https://sublimetextbook.com/
TheOneTrueKyle 10y ago
Trying Atom for funsies. Will be back to sublime soon
SippinLean 10y ago
Project files (.sublime_project) are very powerful and one of the major features I miss in VSCode.
snow_mac 10y ago
I used to use sublime until recently I started to use Atom and one of the things I like is that you can easily sync your settings to a github gist so that you can use your config across systems
- davemac8 10y ago
  You can sync your settings with Sublime as well, although you use a file sharing service (ie; Dropbox).
  - arsham 10y ago
    I don't suggest using Dropbox as it has its own problems. Head over to the other article to see how it can be done easily (and safer) with github.
- arsham 10y ago
  I wrote another article for syncing settings properly: https://medium.com/@arshamshirvani/sync-your-sublime-text-3-configurations-safely-and-easy-b493021c80da https://medium.com/@arshamshirvani/sync-your-sublime-text-3-...
sago 10y ago
Some nice tips. ST was great for me for Python work, but became borderline unusable for me because of one weird thing. In HTML mode it autocompletes snippets based on the empty string. So typing ">" + Enter or even " " + Enter inserts the <a href=""></a> snippet. So I literally can't insert a newline at the end of any content without hitting escape. Doesn't seem to happen in other languages. But I couldn't find how or why or how to prevent it. So I gave up. In a related note, I found documentation a bit limited.
- arsham 10y ago
  Have you tried ctrl+enter ? It makes a new line after the current line regardless of where in the line the cursor is. ctrl+shift+enter creates a line above.
- trishume 10y ago
  I set my autocomplete/snippet expansion key to tab (it's a Sublime setting) so that I never have any conflicts. Sublime actually tries harder than other editors to avoid these, but it's not perfect. See for example https://github.com/sublimehq/Packages/blob/master/Ruby/Completion%20Rules.tmPreferences https://github.com/sublimehq/Packages/blob/master/Ruby/Compl... which stops it from autocompleting on common end of line keywords in Ruby. This wasn't a default in Emacs so I had to spend a couple of hours figuring out how to do this myself before I could do newlines: https://github.com/syl20bnr/spacemacs/pull/174 https://github.com/syl20bnr/spacemacs/pull/174 I'm not sure there are any editors that have auto-complete on enter but don't have any issues with conflicts.
braveo 10y ago
I hate sublime text's vertical editing. It jumps around when I would rather just have it do actual block highlighting the way every other editor that supports block highlighting does it. If anyone knows how to force it to do that I'm all ears, it's easily my biggest complaint about ST3.
rajangdavis 10y ago
I love Sublime Text, I use it for non-development work such as writing text files because of the ease of use. Would love to venture more into the terminal/tmux/vim land but not lose a lot of the nice key bindings that I have been accustomed to with Sublime. I feel like this is the natural progression of being a productive hacker but will wait probably until the end of the year before making the switch.
- tedmiston 10y ago
  > I love Sublime Text, I use it for non-development work such as writing text files because of the ease of use. It's also one of the only programs that has never lost any of my data, even in the extremely rare event that it crashes it's always preserved everything.

105 points by arsham 10y ago

It's too bad Atom isn't as fast or faster than Sublime Text 3. I just can't go back to Sublime Text now, Atom is good enough.

gcp 10y ago
Visual Studio Code?
BuildTheRobots 10y ago
What does Atom bring to the party that Sublime Text 3 doesn't? All I can of (off the top of my head) is slower and chews more memory but is open source.
- andrewmcwatters 10y ago
  Everyone develops packages for it, and they're much more actively supported than ST3 packages. It's really the ecosystem.
  - gcp 10y ago
    I think that's really a side effect of it being free. (And I wonder if VSCode will eat that ecosystem...) Do you have examples where the Atom/VSCode package is much better maintained than the ST3 one?
  - therealmarv 10y ago
    My experience is that the overall Sublime packages are much more stable and do not need so much rework and maintenance. I cannot even count how many times Atom packages failed (maybe it's also just because I cannot see fancy failing error messages of packages in Sublime).
- SippinLean 10y ago
  The interface for one. OOTB Sublime Text can't install packages, for example. Once you install Package Manager, discovery is terrible; you have to know the name of the package you want beforehand. On Atom/VSCode you can easily browse all packages and install them from the editor itself.
berry_sortoro 10y ago
I went from sublime to brackets to atom and sure giving the under-hood is a "bloated" chromium it may be "slower" but seriously does it really matter? I remember to notice the file witching in sublime text was really snappy and I am not sure it always felt like the files where already cached in ram. In Atom I sometime can feel the rendering but thats it. Nowadays I got used to it and I think Atom is not actually really slow. I mean what speed really need form a editor? You need speed in build process ... it the editor takes 20 milliseconds more for something I could not care less. I switched because ST is closed source and I think its (closed source) days are numbered. Given that great open source editors are on the rise. Also given that Atom and Brackets are written in JS/CSS they are so much better when it comes to plugins and integration of stuff if your a web developer I see no reason to go with SL3. Also given that Atom is from Github where pretty much all the code is I think I know without even looking it up that Atom has the most and best maintained ecosystem of plugins.

adrianN 10y ago

That's a pretty neat article. Currently I'm trying to get away from Sublime because it's closed source. I considered Lime Text, the OSS clone, but that project seems to be dead. So I settled for vim. I'm still not as productive as with Sublime, but I'm getting there. Does anybody know a similar article for vim or other editors?

hguant 10y ago
This article seems to mostly be about searching, manipulating words and lines, etc. If that's what you're looking for, vimtutor is a pretty good place to start. It should be available from the command line if you've installed vim. There are some pretty good github pages out there to help configure your vimrc into a monster. Ultimate vimrc is a pretty good baseline if you take the time to trime away some cruft.
antihero 10y ago
I'm using Visual Studio Code and absolutely loving it. If you document your code (JSDoc) etc, the IntelliSense is absolutely incredible. There's a vibrant plugin community, the only flaws I have found so far: * You can't add multiple folders to a project. This is fucking irritating. * The git plugin doesn't work on subfolders - IE because of problem number one, I put a group of (say, microservices) into a parent folder and add that, which in turn breaks the Git plugin. If you can ignore those things it's bloody brilliant. Obviously after you've added a bunch of extensions and stuff to spruce it up. It feels faster than Atom, too.
- gcp 10y ago
  My flaws: 1) Uses Chrome's font renderer - it looks terrible on Windows 2) Indent = Tab size 3) Themes can't properly customize some key on-screen assets 4) No macro recording/playback 5) Can't edit enormous files Other than that the add-on ecosystem can be a bit fiddly, and you won't find syntax highlighting for more oddball things that you'd 100% find for vim or Emacs. Oh, and sometimes it ends up using 100% of the CPU in the V8 GC. Might be add-on related.
  - 10y ago

trishume 10y ago

Good article. Sublime Text has a lot of power up its sleave. I think a lot of people ditch Sublime for vim or emacs because they want a more powerful editor without trying to learn the more advanced features of Sublime and customize it to their liking. I was one of these people, I spent 6 months using Vim and 6 months using Emacs, but eventually came back to Sublime because I could customize it with plugins (like Vintageous) that made it even more powerful and productive than Vim or Emacs. Especially because I wasn't constantly wasting time debugging bugs created by interactions between the piles of hacks all the Vim/Emacs plugins used. I spent 6 entire months contributing to Spacemacs fixing bugs and broken things and there was no end to them in sight. I realized that while I switched to Emacs to get more work done on my projects, I ended up ditching all my projects in order to fix broken Emacs things. That's when I switched back to Sublime.

hawski 10y ago
I started to wonder if Sublime would suit me. I am for many years now primarely vim user. I use it now mainly, because I've got used to it and it's available everywhere. I was once a no-mouse-only-keyboard user, but now it all seem like busy-work. I would prefer just to point out what I want. I am not affraid of typing as I mainly use command line and like to use ocasional pipeline with some awk scripting to achieve output that I want. I find Unix toolset more approachable than vim. It's just that I feel like every magic incantation of vim commands spends my mental energry. I feel smart after some complex edit with only a couple of keystrokes, but a bit less focused at real issues. Editing is such a small part of programming. I understand that people may not have such problems, but that's me. My dream editor would be something like Acme [0], but a bit more modern. I even started doing my own experimental editor [1] inspired by Acme. I mainly want a mouse driven editor with easy ties to shell. Unfortunately my development pace has been glacial for some time. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acme_(text_editor) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acme_(text_editor) [1] https://github.com/hadrianw/werf https://github.com/hadrianw/werf
- Philipp__ 10y ago
  I am kinda thinking the same way. What I liked so much about your comment is that I found myself in pretty same position. I used vim for a few years, got used to that zsh+tmux combo, and my environment was mostly wrapped around Vim (not UNIX like I thought it was). Then after I gave Emacs a shot, I used GUI version, and I saw that it is not the end of the world because I didn't use it as in-terminal editor. I am seriously reconsidering ditching everything and go to Sublime. Why? It's fast, sleek and it does the job. With Emacs I start working on something, and few hours later I am like "why the fuck am I writing lisp and tweaking emacs". I get it, people that used it during 90s, and for 10+ years, they are set in the stone, and why would they switch. But now I really reconsider my options. Vim is much better in that aspect, I spent years with it and have it much or less to my liking, but I always come to some edge case where I change editor. For example, I want to practice few exercises from SCIP I need Emacs, because Lisp programming in Emacs is so effortless and good. I want to write some Go I jump to Vim because vim-go just works perfectly for me. When I am doing some admin work on system I run Vim, but when I want to play with Clojure I need to go back to Emacs. You see the trend? How would Sublime cover all those functional languages, is it any good? If I could have extremely light version of Emacs, that worked in terminal, much better and much more flexible than og Emacs, with good support for REPLs. When you break the no-mouse barrier, you see huge boost of productivity, but later after some time it diminishes and returns. I know I do not want Electron based editor. Terminal preferably but not the key. Something swift and clean. Vim does the job 80% of time but functional languages just work better inside Emacs. I am holding my breath for Xi Editor [0]. It's written in rust, has some interesting abstractions and implementations, native is priority, and overall looks like potential checker for all my boxes. But it is nowhere near to the point of replacing vim or emacs for me. I rambled too much... [0] https://github.com/google/xi-editor https://github.com/google/xi-editor

stinos 10y ago

Nice article, ideal to get new users started with ST. Couple of remarks: - fuzzy search example uses ctrl-p, should be ctrl-shitf-p - idem for wrap lines example - Put your cursor on a word, then hit ctrl+d it will select that word. just double-clicking seems faster (though I reckon if you'll be using ctrl-d repeatedly afterwards anyway it might not matter)

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

tedmiston 10y ago

There are a few staple packages mentioned here, but this post largely just repeats the Sublime docs [1][2], which are easier to read IMO. Wes Bos has a book Sublime Text Power User [3] if you're looking to do even more advanced things, especially with workflows. [1]: https://www.sublimetext.com/docs/3/ https://www.sublimetext.com/docs/3/ [2]: http://docs.sublimetext.info/en/latest/index.html http://docs.sublimetext.info/en/latest/index.html [3]: https://sublimetextbook.com/ https://sublimetextbook.com/

TheOneTrueKyle 10y ago

Trying Atom for funsies. Will be back to sublime soon

SippinLean 10y ago

Project files (.sublime_project) are very powerful and one of the major features I miss in VSCode.

snow_mac 10y ago

I used to use sublime until recently I started to use Atom and one of the things I like is that you can easily sync your settings to a github gist so that you can use your config across systems

davemac8 10y ago
You can sync your settings with Sublime as well, although you use a file sharing service (ie; Dropbox).
- arsham 10y ago
  I don't suggest using Dropbox as it has its own problems. Head over to the other article to see how it can be done easily (and safer) with github.
arsham 10y ago
I wrote another article for syncing settings properly: https://medium.com/@arshamshirvani/sync-your-sublime-text-3-configurations-safely-and-easy-b493021c80da https://medium.com/@arshamshirvani/sync-your-sublime-text-3-...

sago 10y ago

Some nice tips. ST was great for me for Python work, but became borderline unusable for me because of one weird thing. In HTML mode it autocompletes snippets based on the empty string. So typing ">" + Enter or even " " + Enter inserts the <a href=""></a> snippet. So I literally can't insert a newline at the end of any content without hitting escape. Doesn't seem to happen in other languages. But I couldn't find how or why or how to prevent it. So I gave up. In a related note, I found documentation a bit limited.

arsham 10y ago
Have you tried ctrl+enter ? It makes a new line after the current line regardless of where in the line the cursor is. ctrl+shift+enter creates a line above.
trishume 10y ago
I set my autocomplete/snippet expansion key to tab (it's a Sublime setting) so that I never have any conflicts. Sublime actually tries harder than other editors to avoid these, but it's not perfect. See for example https://github.com/sublimehq/Packages/blob/master/Ruby/Completion%20Rules.tmPreferences https://github.com/sublimehq/Packages/blob/master/Ruby/Compl... which stops it from autocompleting on common end of line keywords in Ruby. This wasn't a default in Emacs so I had to spend a couple of hours figuring out how to do this myself before I could do newlines: https://github.com/syl20bnr/spacemacs/pull/174 https://github.com/syl20bnr/spacemacs/pull/174 I'm not sure there are any editors that have auto-complete on enter but don't have any issues with conflicts.

braveo 10y ago

I hate sublime text's vertical editing. It jumps around when I would rather just have it do actual block highlighting the way every other editor that supports block highlighting does it. If anyone knows how to force it to do that I'm all ears, it's easily my biggest complaint about ST3.

rajangdavis 10y ago

I love Sublime Text, I use it for non-development work such as writing text files because of the ease of use. Would love to venture more into the terminal/tmux/vim land but not lose a lot of the nice key bindings that I have been accustomed to with Sublime. I feel like this is the natural progression of being a productive hacker but will wait probably until the end of the year before making the switch.

tedmiston 10y ago
> I love Sublime Text, I use it for non-development work such as writing text files because of the ease of use. It's also one of the only programs that has never lost any of my data, even in the extremely rare event that it crashes it's always preserved everything.